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Could any practicing attorneys or former summer associates speak a bit about how exactly billables work? I don't mean the concept of them, but how you deal with the tedious nature of billing. For example, how do you time yourself when you are billing? When someone walks into your office when you are billing and you are interrupted, how does that work? When you are sucking the partner's dick and you come up for air, do you bill for that?

Basically I'm wondering how attorneys adapt to an environment where things like reading the news is just a waste of time since it's not billable.

And I know it's against ethical rules or something, but does anyone know of times when people were blatantly billing for things that were in no way billable?

I keep an excel spreadsheet open. It calculates my hours as I go. I enter the time I start and the time I stop. Real easy.

The only issue is when you have a lot of things going at once. An email comes in while you're working on a brief and you respond for three minutes, then someone pops in to talk about a case for ten minutes, then you work on the brief some more and get a phone call from another client, and so forth. There's a bit of guesswork in these types of situations. There are some days I work (even if only a .1) on nine or ten matters, which in my experience tends to happen to litigators more than corporate folks.

Our billing software has a little timer app that stores everything you're working on during the day. Press play when you work on it, press pause when you stop. Sync at the end of the day. Helps when you have 20-30 billing entries each day.